Archives for
January 2013

Are you ready to retire your printer? On January 1, Google Drive, HelloFax and four other companies partnered to launch Paperless2013.org and offer free tools to help consumers and small businesses make the transition to a paperless life. Paper accou...

President Barack Obama addressed the nation via YouTube Wednesday to explain his side of the fiscal cliff debate and what the results mean for every taxpayer. In the video, Obama said the United States is finally asking "the wealthiest Americans to c...

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman at Google, is reportedly planning a visit to a somewhat unusual locale: North Korea. Schmidt is joining a private humanitarian trip being organized by former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, according to the Assoc...

In the last month of 2012, the most-shared YouTube ads included some favorites from earlier in the year. The most popular was YouTube's own blowout year-end wrap-up/mashup. The hilarious music video, set to the year's defining pop hits, "Gangnam Styl...

Anyone currently catching up on old seasons of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Dexter or The Wire -- not to mention anyone who hasn't finished the Harry Potter series or watched Empire Strikes Back -- ought to be very careful before viewing t...

Facebook is off to a good start this year. The stock jumped by more than 5% on Wednesday to close at $28 a share, pushing the company's market cap back above $60 billion. Several other big Internet stocks like Google and Yahoo also enjoyed gains on t...

By now, you've probably narrowed down your New Year's resolutions. Perhaps you've chosen one of our favorite WTF resolutions, such as "Stop using my cat as an excuse for a boyfriend." Our friends Nitrozac and Snaggy at The Joy of Tech did some eavesd...

In what may be a first for the platform, a New York frozen yogurt chain is leveraging Snapchat for a promotion that presents users with a coupon that self-destructs within 10 seconds. The idea came about when the chain -- 16 Handles -- noted that a l...

Rihanna might describe this scenario as diamonds in the sky. We'd rather liken it to a supernovas being sucked up by vacuums. Nonetheless, Melbourne's New Year's Eve fireworks in reverse still looks pretty spectacular no matter which way they go. SEE...

Qatar-based cable news channel Al-Jazeera will soon have a foothold in about 50 million U.S. households after closing a deal to buy Current TV. "Al and I are thrilled and proud to announce that a few moments ago Current was acquired by Al Jazeera, th...

Looks like someone should've read a few more reviews before hitting the theaters. This guy's parents apparently had no idea the emotional trauma they would be put through by watching Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman sing their faces off in Les Miserabl...

Reddit is a weird place. Beyond the memes and inside jokes on the front page, there are thousands of niche communities where folks get nitty and gritty about the darndest things. SEE ALSO: A Beginner's Guide to Reddit We've plucked 13 subreddits wher...

Science in sci-fi movies is rarely all that accurate. We get that. It's OK. Space battles wouldn't be nearly as cool on screen if there weren't any impossible explosions taking place in a vacuum. But some movies take their disregard for the basic pri...

A lot of people are hoping 2013 is the year they find love -- or at least a lot of dates. Grant Langston, vice president of customer experience at eHarmony, tells Mashable an increase in sign-ups happens every year on Christmas Day, bumps up on New Y...

As non-profits become more social media savvy, they're releasing more and more viral content on YouTube. As we kick off 2013, Google's social video platform released a list of the five most-viewed non-profit videos of last year exclusively to Mashabl...

Comic artist Bryan Bruner has been smoking for 19 years, and he hates it. This year he's quitting cold turkey, with the help of some robots. In effort to help his smoke-free mission, Healthline has commissioned Bruner to create a 21-page comic. The i...

Samsung launched a varied selection of Windows 8 devices when Microsoft's new operating system debuted in October, but its only touch-screen laptop was the Series 5 Ultrabook. Now it's expanding its selection of touch laptops with the Series 7 Chrono...

Place this smartphone-sized charger in the sun for a day, and it will be able to charge your smartphone or tablet and give you eight hours of reading light, too. That's the claim of the makers of the Wakawaka Power Compact Solar Charger, a Kickstarte...

Songwriters agonize over crafting seductive, witty, insightful lyrics for us to sing along to. Yet, we butcher them every time. Okay, who are we kidding? Whoever wrote, "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad" is in desperate need of some ...

After #SiMonFilsEstGay ("If my son is gay") trended on Twitter for days in France, the country's Minister of Women's Rights said the micro-blog must begin to censor hate speech. Najat Belkacem-Vallaud argued that this sort of speech is illegal accord...

I'm in CES prep mode: Crawling through hundreds of emails, making last-minute appointments, trying to ferret out interested bits of gee-whiz information from tight-lipped tech companies. On the surface, it's a rerun of the past nine years of my life....

The NHL lockout is well over 100 days old now, and even with the players' union delivering another counteroffer to the league on Wednesday, hopes for a salvaged season appear dim. More than half of the season has so far been obliterated. The NHL has ...

For one university, ringing in the New Year also means getting rid of a few tired old words and phrases. Lake Superior State University compiled its annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness...

In social media, friction is often presented as the enemy. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance speaks of "frictionless sharing" as a goal. Last year, Facebook worked with media companies like The Washington Post and The Guardian for frictionle...

There are nearly 70 million tablet users in the U.S. alone, a figure that has doubled from the year before. This means that nearly 30% of the country's Internet users are browsing on a tablet device. Tablet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by 348% fr...

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